We really enjoy running developer competitions, so when we were approached by Amazon to help run their ‘Alexa Skills Grand Tour Challenge’ we jumped at the chance.

Alexa Skills The Grand Tour Challenge

Alexa Skills brings intelligent features and integrations to smart devices like Amazon Echo, Echo Show and Fire TV. The competition, aimed at students, encouraged them to develop a new skill in line with the second season of The Grand Tour, so the presenters could finally ‘meet Alexa’. Amazon wanted creative thinking and offered a range of prizes, which made the competition definitely worthy of entering – the top prize being a paid trip to New York for 4 people. The competition was open to full-time students in the UK and judging was made against the following criteria:

Fun & Functionality

Engagement

Innovation

Feasibility

What did we do?

We were asked to promote the Alexa Skills competition to drive traffic to the contest site, create engagement and increase entries for the event. We constructed the competition mechanics, assets, and outreach plan and managed the end to end competition execution including entry validation, scoring, finalists support and swag fulfillment. We also built a standalone campaign page for the competition including the creative, content, build and maintenance. Lastly, we planned and managed multi-channel promotions to drive submissions throughout the contest period, which included the following:

Email to university course leaders

Display advertising on student targeted website

Email to opted-in students of a popular student website

Organic social media on Amazon Prime Student channels

Paid social media on Amazon Prime Student channels

What were the results?

During 3 weeks, the site received thousands of visits from unique users and the number of ideas submitted to the contest exceeded the set target of 100.

We also added value by creating a database of course leaders and ambassadors at UK universities for ongoing engagement with the student developer community and established relationships with student marketing networks for future promotions.

How to organize your own developer competition

As experts in developer marketing, we want to share our experience and knowledge on how to successfully run developer competitions. We’ll soon be releasing a new guide which explains how to do this and promote the contest through a multi-channel integrated approach. If you would like to receive this brand new developer competition guide once it’s been published, please fill out the form below and we’ll send it over to you.